Terminus

February 15, 1983

At the Black Guardian’s bidding, Turlough interferes with the TARDIS internal systems enough to cause a critical failure: parts of the timeship’s interior are now surrounded by a deadly haze, and those sections could be open to the time vortex at any moment. Nyssa’s room is engulfed, and the Doctor performs an emergency merge with the nearest spacecraft in space-time to allow her to escape onto the other ship. When he stabilizes the TARDIS and then goes to retrieve Nyssa, however, the Doctor learns that he inadvertently sent his friend onto a plague-carriers’ ship – and Nyssa, now infected, can never leave, nor does that transport’s small crew seem even remotely inclined to help any of the people contaminated with Lazar’s Disease.

written by Stephen Gallagher
directed by Mary Ridge
music by Roger Limb

Review: A mixed bag of story elements, Terminus earns at least a few points for giving Nyssa the chance to exit the series with the promise of using her bio-engineering knowledge – knowledge which the character rarely exhibited beyond her debut story only two seasons before. On the downside, the story is padded out with loads of whiny dialogue between Tegan and Turlough, who are trapped in the far too clean and far too well-lit inner ductworks of the plague ship as an anything-but-menacing teddy bear-like creature stalks the corridors. Also be on the lookout for Liza Goddard, Colin Baker’s first wife, in an embarrassingly clingy white spacesuit.

As companion exit stories go, it’s an interesting concept, but somehow the visual presentation doesn’t sell the story as well as it might, and as the middle chapter of the trilogy of stories introducing Turlough, it’s fairly weak, eclipsed by the flashy nostalgia-fest of Mawdryn Undead and the conceptual genius of Enlightenment.

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